A thousand-people-strong Muslim mob attacked and torched homes of Coptic Christians in Egypt last week during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

A terrified eyewitness reported that approximately 1,000 angry Muslim fanatics torched at least 80 Christian homes in the village of Qaryat al-Bayda near Alexandria after Ramadan prayers on Friday.

The assault on the Christians occurred after a rumor spread that the house of Naim Aziz, a Copt, would be turned into a church. Two Christians who tried to stop the mob from damaging Coptic properties were attacked and seriously injured by the mob.

“On Friday afternoon, following Friday noon prayer, a great deal of fanatic Muslims gathered in the front of the new house of my cousin, Naim Aziz, during its construction because of a rumor spread in the village that this building would be turned into a church,” Mousa Zariff, a Christian who lives in Qaryat al-Bayda, told International Christian Concern.

He added that the Muslims were chanting slogans against the Copts and vowed that they would never allow a church to be built in the village.

Aziz, the owner of the house, told ICC that he had stored building materials in the area of his property in order to carry out renovations, but the Muslims didn’t buy this explanation and destroyed the materials while physically attacking Aziz and his brother.

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The Muslims then began to chant the Zuhr prayer, which is recited during the afternoon, before ransacking and torching cars that belonged to Christians. The car of Father Karas Naser, the priest of the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael Coptic Orthodox Church, who happened to be in Qaryat al-Bayda, was one of the vehicles attacked by the mob, Zariff said.

The Muslims “attacked him but some moderate Muslims intervened, rescuing him from their hands and getting him out of the car,” Zariff told ICC.

The Daily Express in England reported that the Egyptian police were called and arrived at the scene but did nothing to stop the carnage.

“The crowd continued to set homes and cars on fire in the presence of officers,” the British newspaper reported.

A Foreign Desk blog post said police had arrested six Copts and six Muslims during the incident. Mina Abdelmalak, a Coptic activist, told The Foreign Desk that the arrest of the Copts during the Muslim assault is standard practice for the Egyptian authorities.

“This is usual business for the Egyptian government in how they deal with sectarian violence,” Abdelmalak, said adding that in most cases police side with the Muslims and force the Christians to surrender their rights and to reconcile with their abusers.

A spokesman for ICC also commented on the arrest of the six Copts by saying: “It is unspeakable that the victims of these attacks were charged with crimes while the perpetrators continue to enjoy total impunity. It continues to show how Christians in Egypt are treated like second class citizens. We call on the Egyptian authorities to ensure that justice is served and that Christian communities like this be protected from further assault in Egypt.”

It was the second time in a month that Muslims attacked Coptic homes in Egypt.

On May 26, Western Journalism reported that a Muslim mob had torched the homes of seven Christian families in the Minyah Province south of Cairo after a rumor spread that one of the Coptic men had an affair with a Muslim woman. The mob also humiliated the mother of the suspected Christian by stripping off her clothes publicly.

In that case, too, police sided with the Muslim aggressors by organizing a “government-sponsored meeting of the two sides in which the Christians will be forced to accept ‘humiliating’ conditions for reconciliation,” Anba Makarios, a local Coptic leader, reported.

“The ransacking and torching of the Christians homes by Muslims are part of a widespread phenomenon in Egypt, where the Coptic Christian minority is suffering from persecution and violence at the hands of Muslims,” Western Journalism wrote at the time.

Sarah Yerkes, a visiting fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy and an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is not doing enough to protect the Christian minority in Egypt.

Yerkes wrote in an article for the Brookings Institution before the attack on Christians in Qaryat al-Bayda that el-Sissi does not see “Copts as a minority in need of protection and is therefore not willing to extend the necessary measures to proactively protect against or respond to attacks.”

The most troubling thing, she writes, is that the president has done little to stop the violence against the Christians and has not initiated projects to reconstruct churches that were damaged or destroyed during the wave of sectarian violence in 2013.